Occupying multiple galleries, one corridor and the great hall of the Art Institute of Chicago is "The Production Line of Happiness," a retrospective by Christopher Williams, the most important conceptual photographer you've never heard of.

The show, which will travel to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Whitechapel Gallery in London, is the artist's first major survey and his first substantial U.S. museum show since 1995. In it, Williams succeeds in getting photography to reveal itself, to answer both complex and simple questions about what an image can do and how.

Born in Los Angeles in 1956, Williams has been producing technically fastidious, politically aware, intellectually captivating and topically expansive pictures for the past four decades. He's addressed international human rights issues, mortality, the Cold War, modern architecture and the representation of women, among other topics. He's exposed the conventions of commercial photography and the conventions of museum display. He's even managed to engage in meaningful dialogue with other artists, past and present, through artworks that are tributes, conversations or long citations.

All this and more: Perhaps most unexpectedly, Williams' photographs look terrific too. They regularly reward the kind of close looking usually bestowed on the work of modernists like Edward Weston but rarely on that of postmodernists like John Baldessari or Douglas Huebler, both of whom Williams studied with at CalArts in the late 1970s. Like his teachers, however, and unlike Weston, Williams also packs some sly quirks into his formally perfect pictures. A photograph in the ongoing series "For Example: Dix-huit lecons sur la societe industrielle" (Eighteen lectures on industrial society) reproduces the conventions of fashion imagery and advertising by posing a female model just so, in transparent panties and bra on a neutral ground, with face discretely hidden. But a few small details, visible only on careful inspection, appear terribly yet hilariously wrong: dirt on the model's bare feet, moles dotting her back, clips visibly tightening the side of her brassiere, panty label ridiculously aligned with her buttock crease.

In that same series are many images of vintage cameras, some presented in austere, multishot portraits, others in startlingly gorgeous cutaways that reveal the complex inner workings of professional lenses. Still more look like how-to illustrations for working a camera. But while demonstrating the act of, for instance, changing the shutter speed, Williams gets in so close, with such shockingly microscopic detail, that the whorls of the male model's fingertips seem to match up with the grooves on the camera's dials, and their pressurized whiteness, alongside tidy but freakishly short fingernails, disrupts what looked at first to be a standard technological illustration.

Yes — really, truly — individual images by Williams manage to do so much at once: appropriation, interruption, witticism, criticism. And then there are the titles, which give copious amounts of information about what is being depicted. This might include the address of a photo studio, the name of a human model, technical details about a camera or tire or shirt or artwork or shower door or chocolate bar, and always the exact date.

Such vast quantities of detail and data insist on just how much decision-making goes into the production of commercial imagery, especially when the resulting pictures appear straightforward. Williams' transparency exposes what's carefully hidden by fashion magazines, scientific manuals and architectural digests.

And by art galleries and museums: Williams reveals the fine art display process too. Full captions of his work include precise measurements for the photographic paper framed and unframed. In "Bouquet for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D'Arcangelo," a single photo that hangs in its own room, the caption goes even further, including a materials list that specifies photo corners, four-ply Conservamat, linen tape, Northern maple, primer, screws and more. Dimensions for this work extend to the temporary wall created to hang the framed, matted photograph, lest the museum setting itself be taken for granted.

If the basics of museum architecture are here displayed with cool reserve — fitting for a work that pays tribute to two conceptual art colleagues who died tragically and far too young — elsewhere Williams has a bit more fun with deconstruction. A handful of movable walls borrowed from the basement photography galleries are carefully littered throughout the show. After 30 years in service down there, dressed in tasteful beige cloth, they must be thrilled to be let loose, tarted up in the bright yellow ground and bold black typography of the retrospective's graphic identity, looking more like fragments of a banner or billboard than a conservative modular wall system. Not only that but they also get to display themselves rather than act as display surfaces, lying down in the middle of a gallery on the second floor of the Modern Wing and smack in the middle of the grand Griffin Court.

Now, about the production line of happiness. Williams catalogs an array of objects, situations and bodies so desired, in all their glossy perfection, that their consumption ought to induce happiness. But by serving them up along with the methods of their own presentation, plus a dash of wit and weirdness on the side, Williams succeeds in doing what his exhibition proclaims only ironically. That is, he produces actual happiness.

He does, at least, for a certain kind of consumer — for example: me.

"Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness," through May 18 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Avenue, 312-443-3600, artic.edu.

Lori Waxman is a special contributor to the Chicago Tribune and an instructor at the School of the Art Institute.